DARPA

The Pentagon Will Spend $2 Billion Advancing Artificial Intelligence Weaponry Officials say they want computers to be capable of explaining their decisions to military commanders The Defense Department’s cutting-edge research arm has promised to make the military’s largest investment to date in artificial intelligence (AI) systems for U.S. weaponry, committing Read more…

Ban on killer robots urgently needed, say scientists Technology now exists to create autonomous weapons that can select and kill human targets without supervision as UN urged to outlaw them The movie portrays a brutal future. A military firm unveils a tiny drone that hunts and kills with ruthless efficiency. Read more…

DARPA to Use Electrical Stimulation to Enhance Military Training It takes years to learn some of the most important national security skills, such as speaking foreign languages, analyzing surveillance images, and marksmanship. The U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) wants to speed up that training process using electrical stimulation to enhance the brain’s ability to learn. The Read more…

You would never buy a hundred million-dollar computer without a repair plan, but that’s exactly what NASA does when it sends costly satellites into space. To ensure that its prized eyes-in-the-sky don’t become the solar system’s most expensive e-waste, the space agency is now building a robot capable of repairing Read more…

DARPA’s telescope will keep the military’s satellites safe DARPA is officially done developing the Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) and has handed it over to the US Air Force. Pentagon’s most adventurous arm worked with the military division for over a decade to build the SST, which was designed to monitor Read more…

Watch DARPA’s autopilot system fly a turboprop plane Next up: autopilot helicopters. It’ll likely take a long time before DARPA’s autopilot system flies military planes on its own, but this latest demonstration proves that it works. Aurora Flight Sciences, the aviation company that’s developing the technology for the agency, Read more…

DARPA Has Launched a Podcast DARPA, the agency that helped invent things like email in the early 1970sand the internet itself in the late 1960s, just launched a podcast. Podcasts have been around since the 2000s, but better late than never, I guess. DARPA, of course, is known as the Read more…

How A Delivery Man Is Trailblazing Our Cyborg Future After losing his left arm to cancer in 2008, Jonny Matheny’s life changed radically. The self-styled West Virginia hillbilly, formerly a retail bread sales and delivery man, started traveling to medical research facilities around the country to volunteer as a test-subject for Read more…

New Startup Aims to Commercialize a Brain Prosthetic to Improve Memory Eliza Strickland IEEE Spectrum A startup named Kernel came out of stealth mode yesterday and revealed its ambitious mission: to develop a ready-for-the-clinic brain prosthetic to help people with memory problems. The broad target market includes people with Alzheimer’s Read more…

Autonomous Security Bots Seek and Destroy Software Bugs in DARPA Cyber Grand Challenge The mission: to detect and patch as many software flaws as possible. The competitors: seven dueling supercomputers about the size of large vending machines, each emblazoned with a name like Jima or Crspy, and programmed by expert hacker teams Read more…

Tiny single-chip Lidar sensor has no moving parts Researchers at MIT and DARPA have created a tiny Lidar sensor that is packed onto a single chip. As you can see in the image, the Lidar sensor is so small that you could pack many of them onto the surface of Read more…

DARPA is Giving $2 Million To The Person Who Creates An AI Hacker TLDR; DARPA just issued a challenge for hackers: Make an AI that can hack other computers. DARPA has been mostly focusing on making new things, pushing the boundary of what is possible to build. But it also Read more…